(hat tip to Athenae at First Draft)

Please take a moment to remember Irene Sendler.
What she did the last time nations with the kind of economic and political power as ours chose to behave as filthily as ours saved the lives of countless children; she paid a terrible price for her kindness, as she was tortured upon capture by the German ’conquerors’ of Poland.

In this Feb. 21, 2008, file photo, Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel Yona Metzger, left, speaks with Holocaust hero Irena Sendler, right, during a meeting in Warsaw, Poland. The family of Polish social worker Sendler, credited with rescuing 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis during the Holocaust, says she has died. Sendler’s daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, says her 98-year-old mother died Monday, May 12, 2008, morning in a Warsaw hospital. Sendler organized the rescue of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany’s brutal World War II occupation. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)

May the world be kinder to today’s  Read more 

The Holocaust is no laughing matter, but I can’t help but giggle at the religious leaders of the groups most invested in popular mythologies who can’t seem to agree that it was a bad thing. Popes are never wrong it seems.

The Vatican ambassador to Israel has sparked a row after refusing to attend tomorrow’s annual Holocaust memorial service in Jerusalem in protest at a description of the wartime role of Pope Pius XII.
Monsignor Antonio Franco, who arrived in Jerusalem last year, has called on Israel’s official Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, to change a picture caption that criticises the pontiff for failing to condemn the deportation and mass killing of Jews under the Nazis. Earlier this month he turned down a formal invitation to Sunday’s torch-lighting remembrance ceremony.  Read more